Creating a Dynamic Dashboard of Datazen Dashboards

One of the projects I’ve used Datazen was a project that needed operational reporting. These dashboards was to be updated at least every 10 minutes and was placed on big screens around the work area where it was needed. We also created an overview, or landing page, for super users that needed to have quick access to all dashboards without waiting for the dashboards loop on the big screens.

In the beginning this landing page was just a static html site, as we didn’t want people to use the Datazen portal at that point. Every dashboard had a static thumbnail and when a user clicked on a thumbnail they were brought to the respective Datazen dashboard.

This worked fine, but it required every user to go into each dashboard to have a look at the status since the thumbnail did not change. So we decided to spend some time to create a dynamic landing page, or a dashboard of dashboards that showed real time thumbnails of the dashboards. By doing this they couldn’t necesserily see the numbers on all of the dashboards, but they would be able to see status and where things where green or red.

Datazen can be embedded in web pages by the use of iframes. Doing this gave us a more dynamic page that was refreshed when a user entered the site or after a given interval if they stayed on it. What you will notice if you try this is that a click on a dashboard will not open the dashboard itself, but instead you will be able to interact with the dashboard in the iframe. In our case, this was not what we wanted as the purpose was to just see the status and when a user clicked on a dashboard they were sent to that specific dashboard to get more details and in full screen.

In order to solve this we created a new <div> called clickCatcher with the same size as the Datazen “thumbnail”, and made transparent. This allowed us to display the dashboard in the size of a thumbanil, but open the dashboard when it was clicked instead of interacting with the small version. The code for one thumbnail is posted below.

It’s a neat little trick that made us able to create a solution that was easier, an better, for the customer. Too see how you we auto refreshed dashboard pages you can take a look here.